Silent House (40 page)

“Is that so? Well, then enlighten me please: what is this thing you call hope?”

She thought a little. “It’s the thing that keeps a person on his feet, so he doesn’t simply die. As children we wonder, What would happen if I died … When I used to think about it, I enjoyed feeling very rebellious. But that fun doesn’t last. The trouble is that if you indulge this curiosity too much, it just becomes unbearable.”

“But it’s not curiosity,” I said. “It’s simply envy. When you think about how things will be after you’re gone, you’re realizing that people will enjoy themselves, be happy, forgetting all about you and going on with their pleasant lives.”

“No,” she said. “Deep down, you are simply curious. You’re pretending not to feel this thing that keeps people from dying, but in fact you do feel it.”

“No!” I said, getting annoyed. “I’m simply not curious, and that’s that.”

“Okay, then,” she said, with a strangely serene confidence, “what keeps sending you to the archives to read all those words in books? You’re acting as if you don’t even know.”

“What else am I supposed to do, just hang around here?” I said.

I still hated myself for harboring hypocrisies inside, but it’s hard to hide from the recognition of someone who knows you well.
One can only claim self-understanding to a certain point, and beyond that one is babbling, whether one knows it or not. It was an oddly liberating thought while it lasted.

When Recep came into the room, I said, “Come on, Nilgün! I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Ooff!” she said, like a child. “I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be foolish! The pharmacist was right. What if there’s bleeding?” said Recep.

“It wasn’t even the man who is the pharmacist, it was only his wife! I feel fine, there’s not going to be any bleeding.”

I tried to get a bit of my own back by suggesting that in this case she was not the best judge of what she was truly feeling, but after
some careful reasoning, I realized I was losing the argument: Nilgün was getting sleepy. She stretched out on the couch on which she’d been leaning her head, and closing her eyes, she said, “Faruk, why don’t you tell me a bit of history? Read to me from your notebook.”

“So, you think that will put you to sleep?”

She smiled mischievously, like a little girl settling in to hear a story, and as she lay there, I happily ran off, thinking I knew just the story for her, but when I went up to my room the notebook wasn’t in my bag. I looked in the drawers, the closet, the suitcase, then searched the other rooms, even Grandmother’s, but I couldn’t find it. It occurred to me that in my drunken state I might have left it in the backseat of the car, but it wasn’t there either. By the time I was going back upstairs to check the rooms again, Nilgün was fast asleep. Seeing Recep draw near, I felt guilty not to have taken charge of the situation, and so I went out to the garden. I installed myself on the dainty chaise longue where Nilgün had spent the entire week reading books, and just sat there.

I thought about the university corridors, the city traffic, white short-sleeved shirts, the hot, humid summer, lunches in the heavy air … Back home, I’d find water dripping from taps, though I’d taken care to shut them tight, the rooms would smell of dust and books, and in the metal fridge, a pale, petrified stick of margarine with a taste of plastic would still be waiting. The empty room, it seemed, would still be empty! I had the urge to drink, to sleep. Then I thought: This sort of thing happens to the best of us! I got up and crept in quietly to see Nilgün sleeping. Recep came in.

“Take her to the hospital, Faruk Bey!” he said.

“Let’s not wake her up!” I said.

“Not wake her up?” He shrugged his shoulders and went down to the kitchen. I went out again and sat down by the chicken coop where the chickens had come out to take in the sun. Finally, Metin got up, still sleepy, but his eyes wide with curiosity. Nilgün told him what happened, and he told her how they took twelve thousand liras
from him last night. When I asked what he was doing out there all by himself at that hour, he fell silent.

“Say, you didn’t happen to see my notebook in the car, did you? I can’t find it anywhere,” I said.

“No, I didn’t see it!”

He was curious about how we’d managed to get the car into the repair shop. I said that it started right up after Recep and I pushed it for a bit, but he seemed not to believe it, and so he ran off and asked Recep. When Recep said the same thing, Metin cursed his luck. He asked whether anybody had gone to the police. But I, gesturing to the effect that there was a bit much going on for us to file a police report, told him nobody had gone and went inside to repeat the warning to Nilgün about hemorrhaging and the possibility of death, though without using that word, wishing only to do my duty and impress upon her a sense of urgency without causing panic.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital now,” she said. “Maybe after dinner.”

Since Grandmother hadn’t come down, I was able to relax and drink during the meal and generally ignore Recep’s efforts to make us feel irresponsible. By the end of the meal, I even had an irksome thought: If Nilgün hadn’t called Hasan a fascist maniac maybe none of this would have happened. Then as I was sitting there, my mind drifted to something I’d once read about in the paper: somewhere on the Bosphorus, probably Tarabya, one of those municipal buses, full of passengers, had fallen into the sea at midnight. I felt, at that moment, as if I were in that bus, as if we had all fallen to the bottom of the sea, and because the lights inside the bus still worked, everybody was looking at the windows in panic, as the shadow of death, which seemed oddly alluring somehow, poured in through them.

After dinner, I asked Nilgün about the hospital again, but she said that she wouldn’t go. So I went up to my room, lay down on my bed, and opened Evliya Çelebi’s travels. I must have fallen asleep reading.

When I woke up a full three hours later, it felt as if an invisible
elephant was kneeling on me, pinning down my arms and legs. It seemed that if I just closed my eyes I would go right back to sleep, but I resisted the beautiful dreamy feeling and got up. I stood stupidly in the middle of the room for a while: What is the thing we call time? I went back downstairs.

Nilgün had woken up, too. “I always wanted to be sick this way,” she said. “So I could lie in bed and read whatever I want without any guilt.”

She was reading
Fathers and Sons
for the second time. The intensity of a bookworm who wants to shut out all of life’s little distractions. She seemed content, and I didn’t have the heart to invoke the specter of death again.

I went upstairs and wandered the rooms vacantly, looking for my notebook. I kept trying to remember whether I had managed to jot down in it some ideas about the plague that had occurred to me. I went down to the garden and out to the street. There wasn’t a trace of yesterday’s activity on the main avenue or on the beach. The sand was wet, the sun was not warm, and the Marmara was still, dirty, and colorless. Folded up, the pale umbrellas had a melancholy look. I walked to the coffeehouse at the head of the breakwater, among the parked cars that would keep emitting all the heat they’d absorbed from the sun until the very end of the day. I saw an old friend from the neighborhood: he was all grown up and married; he even had his wife and kids with him. We chatted a bit.

When they ran into Recep on Monday night, the old friend Sitri had told his wife that I was one of the oldest fixtures around here. He asked about Selma, but I didn’t tell him that we had split up. Then he reminisced about our youthful escapades: how we went out in rowboats and drank until dawn, things like that. He asked me who else was around from the old gang, what were they up to, and filled me in on what he knew. He had seen Sevket and Orhan’s mother, who said they would be coming next week. Sevket had gotten married; Orhan’s supposedly writing a novel. He asked if I had any kids, moved on to how things were at the university, and then got to the
political violence: apparently, they had attacked a girl here this morning, though there didn’t seem to be a suspect. In broad daylight, with everybody standing around. Finally saying we should get together in Istanbul, he pulled out a business card from his pocket and held it out to me. As I read it, he deflated the claim printed on the card: Well, not really a factory, he said, it’s more of a workshop (they made plastic basins, buckets, baskets).

I stopped at the shop on the way home and picked up a bottle of
raki
. When I walked in, I said “Hospital?” to Nilgün before I sat down to drink. Nilgün replied with a stubborn, “Nope.” Recep heard her, too, but still looked accusingly at me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel I could ask him to make me a snack, which I went and made for myself in the kitchen. Then I sat down and tried to clear my head so that the words and images I’d been collecting could flow freely through my mind and possibly take shape so I could do some writing. When it got dark, and Recep brought Grandmother downstairs, I hid my bottle. Metin did not hesitate to put it back on the table and have a few himself. Grandmother was muttering her complaints softly, like prayers. Finally, Recep brought her back upstairs.

“Let’s go back to Istanbul now, right away!” Metin said.

“But weren’t you supposed to stay until the middle of the summer? What about all your friends?” said Nilgün.

“I just can’t take it here anymore,” said Metin. “You stay if you want, Faruk. Just give me the car keys, and let me take Nilgün.”

“You don’t have a license,” said Nilgün.

“Don’t you understand? You’ve got to go,” said Metin. “What if something happens? Faruk’s not about to do anything. I can certainly drive.”

“You’re as drunk as he is,” said Nilgün. “Let’s at least stay the night.”

Having put Grandmother to bed, Recep came down and was clearing the table.

“Well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m not just going to waste the evening,” Metin said. He went upstairs, and a little later he came
down with his hair combed and wearing fresh clothes, and he left without a word to anyone. We could still smell his aftershave when he got to the garden gate.

“What’s with him?” said Nilgün.

I recited a slightly modified verse from Fuzuli in reply:

There was a magical silence in the garden, deeper and darker than the silence after the rain. I got to my feet.

“Yes, go for a little walk, Faruk, it’ll do you good,” said Nilgün.

I hadn’t been thinking of that, but I went for a walk.

As I went out the garden gate, I was thinking about my wife and also about how the Ottoman poets sought out the experience of pain. I wondered whether the classical poets just recited their poems spontaneously or spent hours and hours composing and correcting them. The streets were deserted in the Sunday-evening way, the coffeehouses and clubs were half empty, too; some of the colored lights hung in the trees had blown out, probably owing to the powerful storm yesterday. The muddy tracks of bicycles that had gone in and out of puddles on the street corners left meaningless arcs on the sidewalk. I swayed along as far as the hotel, entering it through the revolving door, led like a dog who smells his way to the kitchen. Above the waiters’ padding on the silent carpets, I made out the source of the music and followed it downstairs. I opened a door: drunken tourists, men and women, at tables, with bottles in front of them, wearing fezzes and yelling at one another. It was one of those “Anatolian nights” prepared for foreign travelers on their last night in Turkey. A pathetic orchestra was churning out metallic-sounding tunes at high volume. The belly dancing had not yet begun. I took a table behind the crowd and ordered
raki
.

Later I heard the clanging of the cymbals, I saw the tanned flesh of the belly dancer undulating at the edge of the spotlight making its
way around the semidarkness, and the shimmering jewelry caught my eye: light seemed to beam out from her bottom and the tips of her breasts. I got excited.

I was on my feet. The waiter brought a second glass. The dancer was playing at being the objectified Oriental woman. As the spotlight traveled around between the tables, I looked at the faces of the German women tourists; they weren’t astonished, though perhaps they wanted to be, smiling as what they had come for gradually materialized, and as they looked at the dancer, I could sense their satisfaction at thinking how they themselves weren’t “like that,” the comforting thought of imagining themselves equal to their men; I felt that they saw all of us as being “like that,” to be looked down on for their own reassurance, a feeling such as housewives enjoy when they order the servants around!

I wanted to break up this unwholesome spectacle, but I knew I wasn’t going to do a thing: I was enjoying the feeling of defeat and mental confusion.

The music grew harsher as a drum whose amplifier was hidden in some corner drowned out the other musicians; the dancer turned her back to the tables and shook her ass with the nervous energy of an overheated hand anxiously fanning itself. I realized that there was a kind of challenge meant by this when she brandished her breasts proudly under our noses, a feeling confirmed when the spotlight revealed an unexpected expression of triumph and confidence on her face. I was myself reassured: You see, it’s not so easy to cow us: we can still do some things; we’re still on our feet.

At that moment, the dancer was all defiance, making those looks from the tourist women taking uneasy sips from their drinks every now and then, their anthropological scrutiny, seem completely ridiculous. Meanwhile, most of the male tourists in their fezzes had let themselves go; they were no longer looking at a woman “like that”; they were relaxed, disarmed of their superiority, humbled as they would be in the presence of a “respectable” woman.

I felt a strange contentment. The body of the dancer, past her
prime but full of action, got me all excited. It was as though we were all waking up from sleep. As I beheld the tanned flesh around her sweaty navel, I felt that I could do just about anything, and I murmured: Let me go right back home, take Nilgün to the hospital, and then give myself over to history without so much fuss about it. There was no reason I couldn’t if I would only believe that stories had their truth, flesh-and-blood experiences that actually happened.